Story, Story

I often find unattended classrooms taking turns telling stories. In Ghana when someone is about to tell you a story, they say "story, story" before sharing their tale. Sometimes when the lights go out the kids will sit around and take turns telling stories. Story-telling is an important part of their culture.

Allow me a quick qualifier before continuing: I am no longer going house by house each evening playing bingo/tutoring. There were too many houses to make that work. So, I leveled the children and am conducting reading classes with 4 different groups of children during various nights of the week.

The "highest" level of kids that I am working with meets on Thursday nights.
I decided that it would be really cool if they wrote stories and I found a way to publish them. I know there are some websites out there that will allow you to format and publish simple books. I was so excited to have them start writing I got a little ahead of myself and forgot to explain the editing process and all the basics of book writing. I was just sitting her reading through the kids' stories and am truely thrilled to see their personalities coming out in their stories. Some chose to write their life history before coming to the VOH. Ebenezer is especially pouring his heart out. Vida is also writing her own. Gideon Sr. and Daniel are writing about how they want to help people in the future, and how they want to grow to be like their fathers. Ernest and Kofi are writing about football (soccer) matches. Knowledge wrote a story about a rich man who neglected to care for his poor neighbors (a remarkable adaptation of the story of the rich man & lazarous in Jesus' parables). I am anticipating it will take several months before we are ready to work on actual publishing. But, I am really excited to see how this project turns out!